I am running Linux on a very old computer donated to me. All I've got left on the drive after all the programs I wanted to use is 700 mb. With yum I find that there are new versions of OOo to update as well as a bunch of language packs. If I try to update any of the OOo suites, they must all be updated and so must the language packs. The problem is that the download itself is 330 MB and the language packs need around 450 MB to update so the update fails.

I'm guessing this is temporary space while the RPM inflates to install and then afterwards it will take the same amount of space or trivially more space on my computer.

I haven't yet tried updating the language packs one at a time, because that might solve the problem. Assuming circular dependencies (ie Writer needs the language packs to update and the language packs need writer to update) is there a way to resolve this problem?

OpenOffice updates really are huge. The easiest fix is to add more storage, but that is probably not an option.

Yes, it is worth trying to install some of the common updates individually.


To make more free space, two things to try are to cleanup the yum area:

yum clean packages

and then to “empty” the trash. There might be more in your trash than you realize. Also, poke around /var/spool and see if there is anything that can be discarded (e.g., like the contents of /var/spool/up2date).

Another option would be to remove some unneeded packages to create space, or to remove some needed packages and to then restore them afterwards.

Is everything in one partition? You might pick up some usable space by placing everything in one partition, if it is not already set up that way. By placing all folders in one partition and expanding it to fill the disk, you will pool the free space, instead of spreading it around the different partitions.

is it possible to set yum to download to another drive? (but still install things properly) I have an external drive with lots of space, it's just not my primary drive

just make symlink to another driver here is example

/var/cache/yum <- this is original location

now move yum to another drive eg
cd /var/cache
mv yum/ /export/
ln -s /export/yum yum

i show u mine to make u more clear
and /export is another drive partition so now whatever yum load file is now on the
/dev/sda2 or /export

[rou@ap4 ~]$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1 8.1G 3.9G 3.9G 51% /
/dev/sda1 23M 5.0M 17M 23% /boot
/dev/shm 316M 0 316M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda2 8.2G 2.5G 5.4G 32% /export
//noc/server 111G 86G 25G 78% /export/mnt/noc

Thanks routers, that solved the problem for me.

If I may:
How could I have found out by myself that /var/cache/yum was the point at which space needed to be added?

Thanks again - DaPi

u can add at any partition ( which is free) as u like because

[rou@net ~]$ ls /var/cache/yum
base extras livna updates-released

those directory content increament file

ps: yum clean all <- does not harm

DJOtaku,

Take a look at the yum config file-
/etc/yum.conf

You'll see the path to the cachedir ...

Also for particular repo's see the files in-
/etc/yum.repos.d

You could perform an update like the following to limit which packages get updated-
yum update openoffice.or*
which would only do openoffice, then remove the openoffice rpms from [cachedir]/updates-released/packages
then-
yum update

Many linux programs have configuration either in a single self named file in /etc, or if a complex program in /etc/program/...

I like routers method of moving the path, I have previously modified the cachedir path to point to my drive with the appropriate amount of space. Same thing but achieved differently. But might be easier for others to follow (who might be used to looking to the /var/cache path). Sunset.